ORHA
precursor to CPA run by Jay Garner = what was asked of us= "I was very fortunate, because I had mentors that were military governors in World War II, and I spent countless hours listening to stories over and over again about what they did. . . . '' ''Being a member of the ruling Baath Party is like being a member of any political party. . . . We called Nazis back to work after World War II because they knew how to run the government. . . . "''For the first thirteen days our plan worked. We had ninety-seven hospitals that were up and operating; we had five thousand police officers back to work; we had fourteen hundred firemen back to work; the electricity had been turned back on; and we had at least identified the shortfalls within the infrastructure. The electrical power infrastructure was bad before we got there, so when it was turned back on, the power was intermittent because it just could not operate properly. . . . " ''So people came back to work, and then ORHA showed up, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which came out of Donald Rumsfeld's office. One night I said, "Look, here's what we've done in your section." And the guy from ORHA said, "We want you to stop. We want you to let everyone go." I said, "I don't understand. We're accomplishing things, and if you stop it, everything goes back to a minus. For godsakes, don't o that." But they wanted to stop the ball we got rolling. I never understood the reason. They just didn't like what we had done. ''" ''. . . Ambassador Bremer showed up and disbanded he military, and he also let the top four levels of Baathists go. '' ''Up until February of '04 I had no problems meeting with insurgents, beause I kept my word.... the leadership of CJTF 7 didn't do what they said they would do. They didn't keep my promises . . . I never got another surrender after that" Alan King, quoted in What was Asked of Us , p 67-61 = No end in Sight, film = The ORHA prepared a list of cultural sites to protect. including the iraq museum. no end in sight, film, 2007 Paul Hughes was on the ORHA, talked with the Independent Military Gathering, group of iraqis trying to get some military police force together. = Laurie Mylroie = Mylroie describes problems with ORHA in her book 'bush vs the beltway', 2003: "As Operationg Iraqi Freedom began, US authorities basically looked to the old regime to formo the basis of the new regime, as detailed in chapter 4. While they planned to remove the top of the Ba'athist power structure, they expected that most institituions of the Iraqi government would survive, and that the estaqblishment of a powstware government would not be an overly onerous task. I twould simply entail replacing one set of top officials with another. This judgement, however, papered over deep divisions between the State Department and the CIA o the one hand, and the Pentagon on the other, which thought that a more thoroughgoing cleansing of the regime would be necessary. As it turned out, when the old regime fell, its institutions fell along with it. And because Saddam's government and its infrastructure collapsed so quickly, the United States did not really have a plan in place to address the problems of Iraq's postwar governance. A new US agency, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was created for that purpose before the war began. But ORHA was the object of teremendous bureaucratic infighting even before it left Washington, again revolvinga round the competing views of the State Department and CIA versus the Pentagon. ORHA reports to the Pentagon, but it is administreted as an interagency organization; now the battles of the Beltway have been transferred to Baghdad, where they are compromising US efforts to establishe a viable postwar order. Major and minor requests are gularly rejected by the State Department if they are preceived as Defense Department initiatives. One close observer pointed out that Secretary Powell could have no idea of the level of this harassment, as it is so petty and mindless" Bush vs the Beltway, pg 225, Laurie Mylroie, 2003 Question: why did the US not have a plan in place to address the problems of Iraq's postwar governance? Mylroie seems to be saying it was because 'saddams government and its infrastructure collapsed so quickly'. Well, wasnt that the whole point of the shock and awe campaign, to collapse his government and his government infrastructure? I dont understand. = Bogdanos and the loot = Talking about 2003, with his cross-agency team in Iraq in the early days of the war: 'We also hit the banks, blowing open safe after safe, and finding more of Hussein's stolen money than we knew what to do with. . . . We were recovering so much money, both Iraqi dinars and U.S. greenbacks, that we could not count it all and had to resort to the scale. (For the record, one million dollars in hundred-dollar bills weighs twenty-two pounds.) We processed the U.S. currency and found an Army unit to take the money back to Camp Udari, still a staging area inside Kuwaiti. I tried to convince the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) to take the tens of millions of Ba'ath Party dinars we were recovering and reintroduce them back into the economy. "Thanks for the advice, Colonel," I was told, with a decided emphasis on the word 'advice'. As in "Don't bother us, Colonel, with your hare-brained ideas." Months later, I read how ORHA was trying to reinvigorate the Iraqi economy by infusing it with seized Ba'ath Party dinars."' Pgs 106-107, Thieves of Baghdad, Matthew Bogdanos with William Patrick, 2005 Question - he says 'several months later'. would it have been the CPA by then? what is timeline for ORHA/CPA? did people stop calling it ORHA immediately or did it take a while? = refs =